Supernatural has reached a kind of emotional event horizon
where the Winchesters are concerned. After so many repetitive tear-jerking
conflicts, they've collapsed into a kind of drama singularity, from which no
real emotion can escape. But last night's episode still wrung a lot of pathos
out of a couple of side characters.

Spoilers ahead...

Just check out the above clip, where Linda Tran — after
being imprisoned for a year — realizes that her son Kevin is dead. The way she
repeats "You will take me to my son" is stark and simple, but
completely sells the realization, and the fury and grief on her face are
insanely effective.

In the episode's "A" story, the Winchesters
realize that Kevin is haunting the bunker where he was killed — because since
Metatron sealed Heaven, nobody can get in there. At all. Dead souls either go
to Hell or just hang around the veil, as ghosts, forever. Kevin's last wish is
for Moose and Squirrel to go find his mom, who he believes is still alive —
and eventually, the boys do find her, chained up in a storage facility that Crowley rented in Wichita.

This storyline is kind of intense for a few reasons: 1)
Kevin died on Dean's watch, and his death was entirely preventable. 2) Linda
has been chained up for a year and nobody bothered to look for her, even after Crowley strongly hinted
she was alive. 3) Dean and Crowley
have been tooling around acting like besties, even while he was basically
torturing Dean's friend's mom. 4) The storage facility demon is a total insane
douche.

In the end, Kevin's ghost urges the Winchesters to stow
their crap and stop being mean to each other — and even after promising to do
Kevin that favor, they both go back to ignoring each other and skulking in
their separate rooms in the bunker.

And then there's the "B" plot, in which Castiel is
once again weirdly noble and long-suffering — at one point, he tells
Bartholomew "I'm nobody," which seems like the ultimate result of a
long period of being broken again and again.

Castiel meets the last surviving member of a sect of angels
called Penitents, who decided to live humbly on Earth among humans, to
reconnect with their original mission, and not to take part in any more bloody
angel wars. Which is why they were all hunted down and slaughtered by
Bartholomew, who can't brook any other angel factions.

The whole Bartholomew storyline has been on the back burner
for ages, and here it comes to a somewhat unceremonious end — or at least,
Bartholomew himself does. There was some kind of satire on televangelists and
megachurches and religious hucksterism embedded in all this, but it mostly got
lost along the way. What remains is that Bartholomew is the ultimate expedient
sadist, who commits murder and atrocities in the name of "following
orders"— or now, in the name of
keeping order, I guess.

Bartholomew tries to recruit Castiel to team up with him, so
they can track down Metatron and get back into Heaven. But Castiel remembers
how Bartholomew tortured and killed prisoners back in the day, and he's not
going to participate in that sort of behavior now — which is apparently a
necessary condition of their partnership.

Castiel gropes towards a philosophy of almost-pacifism — he
won't fight, he won't go to war, but he may use force to defend himself, as
Bartholomew learns to his cost.

Castiel's been a tragic figure for so long, he's started to
lose his pathos — but he gets a big chunk of it back in this episode, where
he's making tough choices instead of merely suffering. He doesn't want to
repeat his past mistakes of making terrible alliances and murdering in the name
of the greater good, but he's also not sure what else he can do. The irony is
that as soon as Castiel decides he doesn't want to be a warrior or a leader, a
bunch of angels decide they want to follow him. This should be interesting to
watch.